Today’s students have it so much easier than we did when doing their assignments. With computers available at school, at home or in the library, they can quickly pull up all kinds of information. We, on the other hand, didn’t have that available to us, and thus had to do a lot more searching than is necessary today.

Our main source at home was the Encyclopaedia Britannica books, which were purchased from a door-to-door salesman. Most homes had at least one of those books, but the purchase price was high and very few parents could afford the whole set.

Some kids had two or three of them and would let you come over and look through them. About the only place that the entire set of 32 could be seen was at the local library.

The first sets of Encyclopaedia Britannica were published in 1768. They also publish Merriam Webster’s Dictionaries and Great Books of the Western World. The retail selling by door-to-door, office-to-office or private home sales parties grew into a $9 billion business.

In 1996, the company was purchased by Jacob Safra, and the home sales program was discontinued.

The main problem with buying them was that the information contained in those books changed every year, so in no time at all the books would be outdated as far as any current data. Now you can access the information from Encyclopaedia Britannica online, and that way all the information is current.

I think I secretly tried to figured out how rich someone was just by the number of Encyclopedia books they had in their possession. Thinking back now, I don’t think we had any books from the set, but most of my friends had one or two.

Computers have really changed everything for students doing research on class assignments.

Now they can type up their work a lot faster than we could write it with our pencils and ink pens. I still have a few ink pens, and just one bottle of ink with the little container inside to fill the pen without getting it soaked in the ink.

Remember getting your work all done and then forgetting to blot it properly? Those nasty blotches would wreck it, and so you had to stay up longer to redo it. I even accidentally tipped the ink bottle and ruined everything.

Now with ballpoint pens, no one has to worry about wet ink anymore. Some of us can even remember when our desks at school had a round hole on the upper right-hand corner to fit your bottle of ink in. I guess it was on the right-hand side as most people are right-handed.

Although ballpoint pens were thought up by an American, John Loud, in 1888, the patents for them numbered more than 350 before they were actually made.

The main problem was the ink; if too thin, it would leak and if too thick, it would clog up.

It wasn’t until 1935 that Ladislas and his brother Georg Biro came up with a much-improved model in Hungary. It too turned out to be a failure as it depended on gravity to move the ink down to the point.

The Biro brothers finally came up with a new design that worked on “capillary action” rather than gravity to get the ink to the ball. The new pen could be held at a slant, and was sold throughout Argentina.

Then the brothers ran out of money, and they sold the rights to make their pen to Eberhard Faber Co. for $500,000. Those rights were later sold to the Eversharp Co., but the pen was still not mass produced and continued to have ink-flow problems.

Finally, in 1945, Gimbels Department Store in New York sold its entire stock of 10,000 ballpoint pens in just one day with the promise that they would write for two years without needing to be filled. The price at that time was $12.50 each, much too rich for the ordinary folks.

Now students just do everything on a computer, much faster than the hours we spent to research and write it out by hand.

A native of Minnesota, Carol Olson grew up in South Dakota and Walnut Creek and now lives in Pittsburg. Reach her at carolleeolson@aol.com.

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